Author: Christopher Carfi

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Dell Loses Another Sale

First, the Jeff Jarvis snowball.

Then Dell threatens to close, and then closes, its customer forums.

Now this, from Desirable Roasted Coffee.

“Dell Denmark approached me a half-dozen times over the summer, at least. At minor expense, to be sure, but it adds up. But the hum started by a guy 4000 miles away, whom I don’t even know, who had a bad experience with a Dell subsidiary I’ll never have to deal with, was enough to wave me off. The hum got into my subconscious. And Dell Denmark could do nothing to get back into the front of my brain.”

Still think that interactions between members of a customer community don’t matter?

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The Reach Of Great Customer Service

Evelyn Rodriguez pulls out the stops and writes a gorgeous piece on her recent experience at The Market Grill in The Pike Place Market in Seattle. Here’s a taste:

“I’m reminded of chado, the Japanese tea ceremony, in the way he slides open the drawers, turns over the salmon, and deliberately spreads every inch of the bread evenly with the rosemary mayonnaise. His companion worker’s movements are just as fluid…Everything is fresh. And they let you know it if the time is right. Slicing the bread: ‘We baked it this morning.’ The emphasis wouldn’t work if every bite didn’t salivate wholesomeness…”

No one on the planet would connect with that description of The Market Grill if it were written by a copywriter, and pushed out through the traditional channels. It has to be external, unsolicited, authentic to ring as truly as it does.

Although a great deal of attention is cast on the less-than-perfect customer experiences that can be highlighted through blogs, it’s also true that happy customers blog, too. Shel Holtz points out the RedRoomChronicles, Marriott hotel stories as they are told by Rob Safuto (who has racked up over 350,000 awards points in their perks program). Safuto writes:

“For all the time we spend in these hotels it’s important that we’re in on every perk possible that might make our business travel just a bit more tolerable.”

These aren’t just blogs. They are links to active, vocal, social communities.

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Improving The In-Store Customer Experience

Some thoughts from Noel Franus. My fave line in the article:

“It should be stated, however, that each of these places, these environments, are much more than spaces…they’re more than just furniture, paint and carpet. They’re marketing tools. Relationship opportunities.”

Some suggestions from Noel:

  • Provide a comfortable space. A couch or coffee table is the first step you can take in shifting the mood from annoyed to relaxed. (Relaxed customers usually shell out more money than annoyed ones.) Investment: $2,000 (furniture).
  • Do you have any coffee? A little java goes a long way toward making customers feel like valued guests. Get a decent coffeemaker and good beans. Or outsource the opportunity to a local brandofcoffeebucks that people know and enjoy. Investment: $1,000 per year (coffeemaker and supply).
  • Dish up the fishwrap. For less than a buck a day, you can give them something to read or watch while they pass the time. Newspapers and magazines can keep those rambunctious customers under control. Investment: $100 per year (daily news and magazines).
  • Nothing but net. Most people are missing out on work while they’re in the store. Give them wi-fi, give them access to information, give them back their productivity, give them back their time. Investment: $700 per year (wireless router and high-speed Internet).

Hat Tip: Jake McKee.

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Resist The Siren, And The Harpy Within

Paul Greenberg writes:

“So the customer is now social, global, knowledge aware, ready to take control of their lives, and the repository of value. This is a new era – and we’ve only just begun.”

Paul, I know you’re on the other side of the continent, but can you see the vigorous nodding happening over here?

Another gem, on the concept of getting big, ossified organizations to make this change:

“When you get directly into the logic of the enterprise, you are at the beating heart and transforming this is a bigtime PITA. What are you going to do? Redirect an auricle? Retool a ventricle? No you have to replace the heart and that is nightmare central. But it has to be done. The enterprise logic has to be replaced so that there are new ways to deal with the new customer that is already out there.”

Read the whole thing.

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When Customers Blog

Susan Getgood has a great, two-part post on customer blogs (that is, enterprise-sponsored blogs that are written by customers of that organization). Here they are:

Customer Blogs: What type of company should do one? and
Customer Blogs: What you need to do to make it work.

Good stuff, read the whole thing, etc.

Some tidbits, to help stack the deck in favor of success. Susan says consider a customer blog if…

  • Customers love the product
  • Customers are already talking in some fashion
  • Others can learn from the customers’ conversations (Susan calls this “exploting an information gap,” but isn’t it more about conversation and learning, rather than “exploitation?”)
  • The hosting company is willing to give up control

The last one’s the biggie, isn’t it? It goes back to trusting the customer, I suppose…

tag:
(what’s this?)

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Jerry’s Brain And The Heresies It Contains

Jerrymichalskihillsideclubaug2005
At last night’s Hillside Club “Fireside Meeting,” Jerry Michalski presented his thoughts on the question that’s been nagging at him…what is it that caused some of the great thinkers of the past 300 years to become “outcasts?” Why have certain types of outside-the-mainstream thought been marginalized and their proponents ostracized?

Part technology demo, part presentation, part sorta-participative-performance piece, Jerry started out with an overview of what *he’s* been using for the last decade to capture, collect, and organize his thoughts, a piece of visual software called TheBrain. In some ways, The Brain is sort of like del.icio.us on steroids, in that it enables someone in the period of just a few seconds to tag a website, book, piece of music, document or any other “thought” with user-defined tags, index it, and store it for easy future access.

Thebrain_1

(from here)

Where TheBrain goes beyond tagging-and-bookmarking tools like del.icio.us, however, is in its ability to create some basic relationships between the different bookmarks (parent, child, peer/sibling, etc.). Although the fundamentals are straightforward, the power of this approach becomes evident when Jerry shows that over the past 10 years he’s logged over 60,000 bookmarks into the system (62,864 as of last night, and counting…), each one connected to a handful of others, creating an ecosystem of links that touches on many of the key areas of human thought.

(Side note: Tracking bookmarks in a dynamic medium such as the web is a Sisyphean task, as web sites change and companies are born…and die. However, the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine really are the “4th dimension” of the web, and allow one to chronicle the life and death of startups with quite a bit of clarity.)

After showing one mechanism for organizing thoughts, Jerry moved over to discussing some of the “heresies” of a number of outcast thinkers of the past few hundred years, including:

Disparate thoughts. Disparate ideas, spanning hundreds of years. Yet, Jerry theorizes that there is a common message that each of these thinkers was railing against. That message they opposed?

“We don’t trust you.”

We. Don’t. Trust. You.
…to self-educate.
…to enjoy authentic art.
…to minister to one another.
…to tell the truth about your lives.
…to design the places we inhabit.
etc.

(Kenneth Tyler asked the question-of-the-evening here, in wondering “Who is ‘we?’ in the statement above…is “we” the government, some other authority group, distrustful organizations, ourselves…?)

The remainer of the evening was wide-open and interactive, with the 40-or-so folks in the room batting around the ideas presented, and finally splitting into emergent groups discussing their various takes on the implications of the discussion.

Moving from the esoteric to the practical, however, the points made at Hillside ring strongly. There are myriad examples where “We Don’t Trust You” is the rule in business with how customers are often treated:

…and so forth.

Jerry was recording the evening on his iPod, so when it goes up as a podcast (at Sociate, I’d presume), definitely check it out.

Note to self: Today, make an effort to notice the places where rules, structures, and physical barriers have been put in place based on lack of trust and/or to ostensibly protect me from myself.